Hamlet's Delay

In his work Hamlet:  A Study in Critical Method, A.J.A. Waldock takes up the subject of the main character's procrastination.  It is an issue much discussed.  Why doesn't Hamlet act?  Why does he wait so long to exact revenge?  Why does it take five acts?

In part, the matter of delay may be one of reading versus performance.  Waldock comments that the delay is more impressive when one reads the play than when one sees it performed.  Beyond that, it is more impressive when one reflects upon the play after having read it; that is the curse of hindsight in this case.  The reader is left to ponder why it was that Hamlet took so long when it may not have seemed that way at all while seeing the play live.  Waldock's opinion of the delay is that it may be the reader or critic protesting too much.

"We are here in an Einstein world, where time has strange oddities, where intervals are a delusion and durations a snare.  What does it matter that a month or two have gone by between Acts I and II?"

For Waldock, the issue of delay is less important than it has been for others.  The delay exists only inasmuch as it is conveyed, and the play does not convey it directly to a marked degree.  Waldock sees the grand problem of Hamlet as this:  "to know exactly how much 'delay' there is in the play...how important...the 'delay' motive was meant to be."  Asking "Why the delay?" presupposes that we know the answer to the question of importance.

Waldock uses Hamlet's soliloquies as evidence of the importance of the delay motive.  Only two soliloquies reflect the issue:  "O, what a rogue..." and "How all occasions...."  The latter is often omitted from performances, leaving only one speech to discuss the issue.  It becomes a minor sticking point, then, and not one on which to judge the entire play.  That soliloquy is a "slight bump in the highway of the plot."

The difficulty that readers and critics encounter is "to square meanings that will not square" as if the play were an historical document and not merely a work of art.  We are left with puzzles, but "what would Hamlet be without its puzzles...?"  Shakespeare was rarely sound in invincible logic of plot, and it would be wrong to look for it in Hamlet.

Waldock wraps his article by summarizing what Shakespeare has given us in Hamlet, and it mirrors other favorable perspectives on the work.

"The portrait of a man who seems to express (and the more in his sufferings and his disasters) all that Shakespeare found of greatest beauty and worth in the human spirit.  There is no one, in history or in literature, like Hamlet.  All that humanity is, all that humanity might be, seem figured in him."